isabel

I'll be arriving at Lisbon airport at 6:00 am and planning to take the metro to Oriente to get a train to Lagos. I have a choice of 8:23 and 10:02. I'm thinking we could make the 8:23 but hoping someone could confirm this. This will be on a Friday morning in March. Obviously flights can be late, but assuming it is more or less on time is 2 hours enough time? I can save more than 50% by buying the train tickets ahead of time. Thanks

mbjl1976

Hi,

From the airport to Oriente is very fast, only 3 metro stations( 10 to 15 min). It all comes down to the airport, its a Schegen flight or a international one? If it's a Schegen flight you'll not have problems assuming that the flight will not be delayed. If it's a international flight, it'll be hard because it takes a lot of time for passport check.

isabel

Thanks for the reply. It will be a non Schegen flight (from Boston) but I was thinking even at that I didn't think it would usually take two hours. I've only been through the Lisbon airport once before so don't remember how long things take there. So are you saying you think it will take over 2 hours to de-plane and clear passport control in Lisbon airport?

mbjl1976

Hi,

I can't say for sure if 2 hours is enough, what i can say is that i been hearing some complaints about very long waiting hours in airports for passing the customs in international flights.

thursdaysd

I have seen a complaint here about the length of time it took to clear immigration in Lisbon, I believe it was a full hour. Plus, there is no guarantee that your flight will be on time. Why set yourself up for stress? Maybe everything will be fine and you make the train, but maybe not.

Having written all that, I checked the price of the rail ticket. Buying a ticket for a train leaving today is not more than 23.15 euro second class or 30 euro first class. Promo prices for March are in the 12 or 19 euro range. I would not bother buying a ticket in advance.

Nikki

Hi Isabel! No suggestions but getting nostalgic about Lisbon and the amazing evening we spent with you and a group of Fodorites there. Have a great trip!

isabel

Hi Nikki - I've been thinking about you as I plan this trip. Can't believe it was 12 years ago! That evening was amazing, and obviously won't be able to replicate that but I've been wanting to go back to Portugal since that trip. Have you done another trip to Portugal since then?

Re whether we can make that 8:23 train - yeah, it's not much money, we're talking about 10 euro now vs 23 if we wait, but saving 20 euro (for two) is still 20 eruo but I'm not going to stress about it. I was actually just reading my own 12 year old trip report and realize that the crowds in the airport can be very different day to day. But at least it's good to know it's only a 15 minutes metro ride.

Nikki

Isabel, I did return to Portugal twice after that, both times with my husband, in 2007 and 2009. Would love to go back.

flanneruk

My last experience (mid-November) with immigration at Lisbon (the UK's not in Schengen, so we go through the same system as flights from the US) was that it took about 30 secs between getting to the machines and getting out of them.

They were all working, obviously these days everyone knows how to operate them and virtually everyone's got a chipped passport .

What, of course, I don't know is whether Americans (are you American?) can use the machines, whether even if they can their passports are all chipped and whether you really are on a non-stop flight from Boston. If it's a codeshare changing somewhere like Amsterdam or Madrid, you'll have gone through immigration there.

But the facts that virtually all Western Europeans coming through Western European airport immigration now go through machines in seconds, and that the overwhelming majority of international flights within Western Europe don't need passports anyway, mean that queues for the chipless are a great deal shorter than they were a couple of years ago.

So stories about someone's second cousin waiting for hours in 2015 are valueless.

thursdaysd

Has something changed recently? I travel on UK passport in Europe, and always seem to go through the same lines as other EU citizens. Certainly not the same lines as US citizens, and I don't remember a "Schengen" line either.